


These Are Our Bones

by doesnotloveyou



Category: Logan (2017) - Fandom, Logan - Fandom, X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Family, Gen, Laura Kinney is not alone, Not Logan (Movie) Compliant, Other, Post-Logan (2017), Protective Siblings, Revenge, Sister-Sister Relationship, Sisterhood, Standard Gore?, Strong Language, The Wolverine Family, Violence, idk i hate gore but here there be gore, if Ace from Regenerate was involved, literally haven't seen movie just wrote fic from what i heard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-29
Updated: 2018-01-12
Packaged: 2018-12-21 05:40:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11937498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doesnotloveyou/pseuds/doesnotloveyou
Summary: When Laura Kinney disappears over the border into Canada she is tracked as far as an abandoned farm off a dusty road. Her hunters arrive, unaware that an unknown ally of Logan lies in wait.Ficlet where I imagined Ace into the X-Men Universe as it was portrayed in 'Logan' which, if you read the tags, I still haven't seen. Takes place after Logan's death.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Shout out to /weatheredlaw for encouraging me to post fics gathering dust on my harddrive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic, at least chapter one, is partially inspired by True Grit (2010) which was phenomenal and I highly recommend. If Logan wasn't partially inspired by it too then I think someone's lying to themselves.

Booth steps down from the truck cab and looks awry at the hood, hearing a strange sound coming from the engine. V.D. kills it, but the sound balloons to a deafening swell.

Crows. The boughs of nearby trees are infested with oily birds scolding the men and their vehicles. Booth waves a hand over his shoulder and Adamczyk fires off his shotgun, predicting a flurry of indignant ash. It doesn’t occur, but now the trees tremble with rage and howl louder—leaves shivering free in relief.

“Cowards don’t leave their nests,” V.D. reminds him over the din.

Booth creases his mouth and walks forward. The auditory assault stops occupying him with the first footprint at the edge of a dusty yard. Adult-sized and none to accompany it.

The house itself is a dried-out shell. Six sole-smoothed steps empty onto a haggard front porch wallowing before a yawning doorway with a lintel threatening to jump. Toothless window frames gape, and the house breathes with the breeze. Color has been rinsed from walls splintered so thin he can see through them like starving men. Eczema flakes the roof where shingles have been displaced by tufts of weathered grass.

There is no furniture, no garbage, no door. No one has so much as pissed here in years. Wouldn’t it be ironic if he thrust her over the border to a security that didn’t exist? A friend he’d outlived? His safe haven dead and gone, just like him and the old man.

Yet, here is this footprint and the pungent fug of a smoked cigar.

Booth pauses his journey at the foot of the steps, hands on hips. Avian judgment continues to be hurled in the background, the sentries’ vehemence parting only where the house is concerned and the trees become figurative. Shadows flit in his upper periphery—more birds filling in the ranks. The smoke is so strong he swears he can feel the heat of the smoldering cigar as he burdens the first wooden step.

“It was you who killed Logan.”

He starts—the voice directly in his ear—and steps back hard on his heel. A seated woman materializes on the top step, elbows leant, cigar poised like a dart about to be thrown. Booth regains himself, remembers his sunglasses aren’t guarding his expression, and knows she saw him flinch at the crows. The weapon isn’t here and this woman might not be alone.

“Where’s X-23?”

Her features are sleeping, her eyes a dead stare. She blows smoke in his face. “Where’s his body?”

“The border. Where’s the girl?”

“U.S. or Canada?”

“What? U.S.”

She scowls. “Bring him here.”

“Show me X-23.”

She takes a quick puff, exhales, “No, she’s mine now. I don’t put what’s mine on display.”

“I hate to inform you, but that child is the property of—”

“Then I’m sure the Canadian government will gladly work with you in returning her,” she smiles thinly, holding the cigar at a distance, “until then you’re on my property.”

Booth looks back at the eleven men he brought with him, all squinting at him or scowling into the trees, armed within an inch of their lives. He looks back at the woman, hoping he made his point, but willing to spell it out for her if need be. She is studying the cigar between her sun-baked fingers, probably contemplating how much she wishes it were cannabis instead. “He smoked these the entire time I knew him.”

Booth purses his lips and decides to kill her.

“I hated the smell,” she continues, “and the taste. Now it just takes me home.”

Bending his knee, Booth places one foot on the middle step and leans toward her; she casts a derisive glance at his shoe.

“Your ‘home’ got between us and our rightful property before bleeding out under a cloud of flies. Now, you’d best get it out of your head that she’s any ordinary girl, that she just needs a tea party and a dress to make her normal. She is a weapon. There’s nothing in there you can save. If we leave you with her, you will end up worse than our boy Logan because she will turn you inside out without meaning to; she will malfunction without proper care. So just tell me where she is and,” he nods his chin at the house, “you can go back to your decadent lifestyle.”

The woman’s face is no longer asleep, eyes carved from centuries-old stone. Her mouth is tight, nostrils flared, and her body stiff. She stands up, keeping eye contact as she takes another drag.

“There’s this classic horror film with a sad excuse for an ending, but cinephiles always refer to it like it’s holy verse. Cowards _shouldn’t_ leave their nests.”

He creases his mouth into a frustrated smile—wasting time on a lunatic liberal, a backwoods hillbilly, a bitch whose insides will see the sun before her eyes ever see that girl again. The woman sighs and looks at the driveway.

“They’ve stopped screaming, you idiot.”

Booth watches her as his ears register this fact—the battle has ended, marked only by the occasional croaking of a few birds. He spins his head, pushes off the step, and stares at the vehicles blackened with hellish snow. Eleven men lie across the hoods of the cars, feet sticking out of open doors, arms and legs spreadeagle in the dirt. V.D. has his head under the front bumper, staring out of empty sockets as the macabre animals obscure the rest of him in their frenzy.

Booth staggers forward, puts his arm up between him and the woman, feels his stomach crawl into his throat and get ready to cut the cables. She watches him without pity. Her lips curl back exposing a set of inhuman canines, and her eyes slit and fill like a delighted housecat.

“That girl can’t do any more harm than I’ve ever done.”

She descends, and he is too petrified to back away. On the bottom step she throws the cigar to the dust and he tears his eyes from hers to watch it go; catching those curved, clear claws flicking it away.

“I made him,” she says. “Somehow. Somehow these claws were relevant to the making of Weapon X Prime.” She lowers her head, her brow, and her tone of voice. “Please, please, _please_ tell me there are not twenty-two more of him somewhere. Are there?”

“No, ma’am.” He blinks at the words, why he chose to tell the truth or call her ma’am. He hasn’t called any woman that since he was seventeen and told his mother “No, ma’am, I won’t enlist” a week before he did.

”I didn’t pick ‘ma’am’.” She narrows her eyes. “Had Logan made it over the two of them could sit back and watch as I stretched your guts out for the satellites to see, but you managed to fuck that up too, didn’t you? You can’t do anything fucking right; you can’t even piss your pants properly.

“What did you think was going to happen?” She advances on him like they’re on a branch and his end is dipping. “You thought you had control over genetics? Over him? Over us? You thought mutants were some extinct species that you could continue to play with like smallpox in a vial? Stupid little man. No child reared by Wolverine needs a tea party and a dress to know she’s whole. She will rip your throat out and drink her brew while you bleed and bleed and bleed. Your mistake was not making more of us, but destroying the only people who ever held us back— _for your sake,_ you ignorant trash.”

Heat scalds his ears—no one talks to him like this, not in a decade. Hands turn to fists, teeth grind on teeth, and masculine pride burns in every extremity. But the woman, the thing, does not still her stalk until she is an inch again from his ear.

“Laura will never be alone in this world like he was. She will not feel the pain that was inflicted on him, but you will pay for both their pains because I didn’t kill more of you when I had the chance. There were not enough pale uniformed bodies floating to the surface of the lake or buried beneath the rubble to make up for the decades we three have gone through. Four. Five. Eight of my friends were once ‘government property,’ but I can’t make you pay for them too—I have some mercy in me right now.’”

He gasps as a sharp pain stabs his abdomen, but she hasn’t moved. Nor does she react as his knees give out and, clutching his stomach, he collapses to the ground. No blood between his fingers, just a body on fire, and he presses the back of his head and heels into the dirt to distract the pain. No toxin or gas could be doing this, nothing more than his own body forcing punishment into every muscle and vein. His mouth opens to scream, but no sound comes out.

“No, your men will not receive a proper burial as I’m sure Logan did not receive one. If I move them at all it will be into an open grave for any scavenger to pick through. Their dog tags are mine. They won’t be remembered.”

She rubs her neck and makes like there is pain there. Then she cracks her knuckles and flexes her fingers. Those claws, those claws…

“Of course you don’t have more of him.” Her slitted eyes roll down lazily as if to see if he’s still there. “Why else would you be hunting a nine-year-old mistake, your last ditch effort to explain away fifty years of wasted funds, if not that you were out of ideas?”

Thick bile rises in his throat and he chokes. The blurry exits swing in his periphery again, the branches above them grow dark fungus. The fungus flaps, says something flat and hard. It slaps him on the cheek.

“No, you don’t get to die yet.” Her face comes into focus, her eyes human again. “You show me where Logan’s body is first. Then, you die.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a POV switch in here for those of you needing heads up for that kind of thing.

                There have been moments where I felt like a player in a reenactment. An action as simple as opening a door to a scene as plain as a dark-haired child recreated a memory that had long rubbed away.

                “Logan sent me.” A cigar thrust over the threshold in a knotted fist. I heard her metal bones first, smelled her genetic marker second, and desired neither the offering nor the pedigree attached to it.

                Inside I protested, spelling out my case against the man, her, and my complete unwillingness to get involved in “anything” ever again. By the time she’d sat down on the couch with her backpack still strapped on, I’d steadfastly decided to close the door in her dour face. While she was sniffing the room, I noted derisively that those were Logan’s features and Logan’s eyes and that she smelled almost exactly like him. And blood, but blood was also a smell I associated with Logan.

                “I can’t help you,” blurted from my lips at the same time I knew I would help her. She must’ve known too because she did not tighten her grip on her shoulder straps. A passive eye lingered over me, and again I found myself standing in a memory with mud at my toes and a stomach growling.

                “Were you followed?” I asked.

                His own eyebrow arched steeply from a nine-year-old girl’s face, sending a strange chill through me.

                “You got a tracker on you or a tracker after you?” I did a quick calculation of the trackers I once knew and how old they’d be now.

                “After me.” I unrealistically expected her voice to be deeper and not so girlish. “They’ll be here soon.”

                Natural-fucking-ly, I thought. “You heal?”

                She sniffed. I walked to the fridge and started taking out leftovers.

                I sat across from her, déjà vu unrelenting as she gnawed and tore through double servings of anything placed in front of her. I ate like that until I was twenty-three and Logan said nothing. He disregarded most of my foibles; that was his strong suit.

                Also like us, talking clearly wasn’t on her agenda. While she consumed I sifted through her brief memory banks, smoothing out sheets of data like bolts of fabric. If she noticed, it was those sporadic glances between mouthfuls, but she may also not have trusted me around her meal.

                Finally, I tucked away the contents of her psyche and asked, optimistically, “Am I a stopover on your way?”

                She eyed me over the rim of the bowl, licking it clean for the fourth time.

                “In that case,” a shrill voice in my head demanded that I say nothing more, “there are things you need to know. I live alone, but I have friends over. They’re rowdy, they’re loud, and if Logan hated them you’ll hate them too. _¿Te comprendes?”_

                Eyebrows rose, and she set the spotless dish down before nodding warily.

                “Get used to me knowing things. _Y cuando estamos con otros_ if I speak to you in a language you reply in that language. People needn’t know our business.” I handed her a washcloth. “Wipe down your place at the table, I’m retired from cleaning up other people’s messes.

                She gripped the washcloth. “You live alone.”

                I observed her non-expression closely. “Exactly.”            

 

                There’s the shallow pit, carved out by bulldozer back when a housing development was underway, a fresh mound of dirt obscuring the lowest point, just as he described. My dad is under that dirt, my real one not the one I’m related to. His grave is unevenly piled with rocks big enough for her to carry, destined to be dug up after sunset by some aspiring scavenger.

                I knew they didn’t bury him.

                Nearby, Tyler Booth coughs on a scratchy hillock, his organs failing him as he hallucinates about starving crows. I did not tread softly with that illusion as I did not intend him to live, so his mind is permanently screwed. If he dreams of being buried under the creaky floorboards of an abandoned farmhouse, I’ll be alright with that.

                I walk down to the grave the easy way and don’t rearrange a single stone- I’m dying to. There’s a crude cross erected at one end that I disassemble and lay its pieces at either side of the mound. Logan was not religious, and being victims of torture both we did not appreciate it. Sitting down, I let my hands fall to my sides. We’re both silent. My skin and clothes still smell like a Cohiba.

                “No, I didn’t plan for this.” I scratch my nails in the dirt. “You get to be right about that too.”

                Wind passes over our heads.

                “Yes, I know. I know you’re not here.” I bite my tongue and hold back for a second. “But you always wanted me to talk to you.”

                I drag my fingers through the dirt at the mound’s base, tired of funerals, tired of everything.

                “She’ll be safe.” I nod as if he’s watching. “She’ll always have backup. I know you don’t want either of us to be lonely and that’s why you sent her. If we’d sorted things out sooner she’d have both of us right now. Fucked that up too. Never thanked you enough for…damn, everything. Blamed you for it all instead, naturally. God, I’m sorry.” I lick my lips and wipe my eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

                I lie down beside Logan’s grave and search our patch of sky for a sliver of moon. Putting my hand out, I sink my fingers into the soil. “I love you, dad. I know you did your best. Get some sleep now. You deserve it.”

                Tears pool in my ears and streak through my hair. A hundred-year relationship and we were friends for roughly twelve of them. I can’t remember not knowing him, and can’t imagine facing the centuries ahead without him.

                The earth around us trembles. As it collapses in, I keep my eyes on the sky and my hand on his grave. In some parallel universe, this has already happened a long, long time ago.

* * *

 

                Tyler Booth died of curious yet natural causes along with all his men. They and their vehicles were driven into the clay pit behind an abandoned quarry where, with their windows rolled down, they sunk to the bottom. Laura does not ask about the clay-caked boots and dirt-streaked hair of her newest guardian. But she does notice.

                By nightfall she’s hungry again, but the woman is sitting on the couch beside her looking tired and has not moved to heat up anything. Laura decides to eat it cold, but when she’s climbed over the back of the couch and opened the fridge, the woman gets up and leaves the house. Laura wills the food to stay, and follows.        

                She stops on the bottom step of the house, suddenly wary of going further. Across the dirt road, the woman stands in the middle of the empty field watching the moon rise, silhouette blending with the dark horizon. She does not move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ehhhhhh...it's been a slow writing year for me. Hope you enjoyed.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not as exciting or as structured as Regenerate...*phew*

                Papers that were once stacked neatly now cover the kitchen table.

                “No,” Araceli shakes her head, “do it again. L-A-U-R-A.”

                “I _know_.” Laura vigorously erases her writing and blows on the eraser dust just so the papers will go flying. Patiently, Araceli rises and gathers them again.

                “Do you want to go into a home? Do you want them to find you again? Do you want to go back to that place? You need to write your name here. I _need_ you to write your name here. Please.”

                Laura sighs and writes her name. She knows how. This is just boring.

                While she ate dinner, the woman named Araceli left and came back with a stack of papers warm from the printer and smelly with fresh ink. Then she filled in all the blanks and gave Laura some to sign too.

                “Please, kid,” she holds her head in her hands, “I’m trying to make this as seamless as possible. I don’t know any lawyers anymore, so we’re playing it by ear. Tell me the truth.”

                “You’re my half-sister,” starts Laura, “who adopted me when dad died of lung cancer in South Dakota—” she stops to think, “—two years ago.”

                “And we’ve lived at this address for?”

                “Since Christmas.”

                “And if they ask which Christmas?”

                “The one without dad.”

                Araceli looks up sharply. “That’s good. Use that.”

                Laura smiles at herself and takes a drink of coffee, eyes raised to the wall clock. The one and the three are being pointed at.

                “Okay,” Araceli sighs, “what about when people come to the door and I can’t answer it for whatever reason?”

                “Don’t fucking open it.”

                “Don’t say ‘fucking’ to start with, they’ll think you were raised in a drug den.”

                “You said ‘fucking.’”

                “Yeah, because you said ‘open it and let them in.’ Don’t mess with me like that, it’s not funny. What is that, what are you drinking?” Araceli sniffs the air. “Shit, I thought it was cocoa.”

                Laura clutches the mug in case she tries to take it away.

                “You’ve just been drinking coffee grounds this whole time? Kid. No.”

                Laura bends her brow. “Yes.”

                “Okay, okay, whatever.” She sighs. “I’ll do a better job next time and hopefully not cry while I’m doing it.”

                “Did you kill them?” Laura asks.

                “Kill who?” Araceli clicks her pen while rereading a paper.

                “The people who followed me here.”

                “Oh.” Araceli squints, but doesn’t look up. “That’s not in your script.”

                “How did they die?”

                “See, morbidity will also creep people out. Better yet, memorize your lines in Spanish; we’ll work on your French and Russian later.”

                “Why is your name Araceli; Logan said it was Ace, is Ace short for Araceli?”

                “It’s short for I’m not afraid to kick your skinny ass when you irritate me. You may be a child, but you’re also a trained killer, that gives me license. Don’t give me reason to exercise that license.”

                When the papers are filled out to her satisfaction, Araceli steps out the back door and disappears for twenty minutes. Laura doesn’t know where or how she disappears, but she tried following her the second time only to lose sight, smell, and sense of her on the back porch.

                “How do you do that?” is the first thing she asks when Araceli enters through the back door holding nothing anymore.

                “I just do it,” she answers. “I have a picture of the place I want to go to in my head and I go there. Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom.”

                Laura’s standing on the back of the couch trying to reach the ceiling with outstretched fingers.

                "And congratulations slash my condolences, you are officially adopted. Or, you will be. The papers take a day or two process and I don't feel like speeding that up."

                Only a few inches more…and she could touch it.

                Araceli jumps when Laura extends her claws and puts a notch in the ceiling. Laura looks down at her triumphantly until she reads her dark expression.

                “Is it just the two on each?” Araceli asks flatly.

                Laura hesitates. “Feet have one each.”

                Araceli drops her gaze to Laura’s besocked feet and stares with disgust. Then she goes into her bedroom and shuts the door.

                The sun sets and still she does not come out. Laura gets tired of waiting— from what she can hear, the woman has gone to bed. Not being hungry and wanting to save the outdoors for tomorrow, Laura looks for something to entertain her.

                It isn’t a favored pastime, but when she gets bored Laura follows her nose. It is not a big house. She can smell that other people have been there— one man in particular— and when she upends a box of clothes in the laundry room twelve more people come into existence. Socks, underwear, three t-shirts, a jacket. There are two belts in the mix, and Laura latches one onto the other to make one long one. 

                Araceli shuffles into the room, arms crossed, barely lifting her feet. She watches Laura pull on each end of the frankenbelt , tightening it, without a word. Then she shuffles back to bed.         

* * *

 

                Why would he do this to me? I don’t want a kid. In nearly fifty years of womanhood when have I ever tried for a kid? I haven’t even taken a second stab at marriage after that first crushing disappointment, haven’t attempted adoption or even a mentorship— which I feel bad about, but also, you’re welcome. Other people’s kids I’m fine with, as long as one of us gets to go home at the end. Now I HAVE NOWHERE TO GO.

                I slam the dresser drawer shut and scream with a shut mouth. “What?”

                Laura stands in the doorway behind me. “There’s a dog outside.”

                “So?”

                “Is it yours?”

                “No. Don’t let it chase the cats.” I almost add _chickens_ , but that was a different house and a different decade.

                She leaves again.

                Will it be like raising myself? I look at my own, untainted hands— no implants or surgical history to speak of— then patiently release my feline claws, the result of innocent, childhood experimentation. No, I hope it’s much easier than raising me. I can’t imagine raising Logan would have been any better, but not even he could remember that far back. Maybe he did, but I was already gone by that time. Thanks, Logan, for dying without a set of instructions as to how to raise _your clone._ Had I been his biological daughter I could consider this the learning experience of a lifetime: how to raise your father as a preteen female assassin with metal claws in her hands. And feet.

                I know karma when I see it. There’s a _Twilight Zone_ episode like this where a spoiled young wife has to raise her own husband, as if you need an alternate reality to experience that.

                I knock my head against the dresser. “Who you gonna call?”

               

                “Bob’s Fuckup Service, how may I help you?”

                “That’s mean,” I note, “didn’t Bob kick it like fifteen years ago?”

                “How do you know he didn’t fuck that up to? He could be anywhere, watching over us with a stupid little harp he doesn’t know how to play.” The noise in the background tells me Wade’s either working or playing. They sound the same now that virtual entertainment has surpassed all his wildest dreams. If it weren’t for the landline I installed for direct access to him, he’d never leave the house.

                “I need you,” I tell him.

                “I’ll come now.”

                I wrinkle my nose. “It’s not that kind of need.”

                “I’ll come whenever I feel like it.”

                “Perfect, see you then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm apparently also writing a Bucky fic, starting today. It's guaranteed to be short (I'm quite lacking in Bucky feels), but I like what I'm writing and you can thank the Bucky fic on this site for inspiring it. Anyway, if that interests you I'll post it when it's finished...if the inspiration sticks around long enough. We'll see.

**Author's Note:**

> Might continue. Might not. Should probably just watch the movie.


End file.
